The year 1976 presented us with a strange brew of political oratory: on the one hand, a barrage of ephemeral campaign rhetoric proposing immediate solutions to the problems of the moment; and on the other hand, bicentennial celebrations recalling two hundred years of freedom and order made possible by the wisdom arid sacrifice of our forefathers–statesmen who refused to take the short-term view of life.

There is a growing recognition among the more thoughtful observers of our day that the surface problems of crime in the streets, urban decay, economic disorder and the like, serious as they are, are symptomatic of a more profound illness. And if this is true, our task is not to propose short-term relief from the symptoms but rather to identify the underlying disease and then seek a long-term cure.

This is not a popular approach in a generation wholly consumed with this present life. As Henry Kissinger has reminded us, the elected official in our time who aspires to be a statesman and look for long term solutions requiring short-term sacrifices–such an official risks political suicide.

Where do we look for illumination, for parallels in history? I suggest to you that one such parallel is to be found in the conditions of ancient Israel in the eighth century before Christ. I propose to you that our path may be illuminated by the great Old Testament prophets of this period: Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and Micah. These were prophets that took the long-term view and anticipated correctly the main issues of history in their time.

As in our day, their times were prosperous but decadent. The social fabric was in poor repair. The prophets observed the surface symptoms of lawlessness, social injustice and licentiousness and went on to diagnose the underlying spiritual sickness. They reminded the people .of their rich heritage and sacred covenant relationship with God; they issued a call for repentance; and they pronounced their warnings of impending divine judgment.

Listen to the timely words of the prophet Hosea: The Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land.

There is no faithfulness or kindness, and no knowledge of God in the land;

There is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds and murder follows murder.. .

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. . . .

Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God.

For the spirit of harlotry is within them, and they know not the Lord.

From Hosea 4-5

1. THREE MAJOR SYMPTOMS

1. The Loss of Communal Custom

If such a perceptive prophet were living in our time, how would he diagnose our situation in the United States? Or in the world? His basic response would be that we have forgotten God and His laws. But I believe he would first focus on three major, inter-related symptoms in describing our present predicament.

The first symptom has to do with the loss of communal custom.

The ordered freedom of advanced societies has always depended not only on the coercive power of the state but also on the authoritative influence of customary relationships and social institutions. Over the ages certain persons in well-ordered societies were expected to, and generally did, defer voluntarily and respectfully to the authority of others: wives to husbands, children to parents, students to teachers, employees to employers and laity to clergy. The state e supported and encouraged to varying degrees in different times and places, the institutions of marriage and church and various of these other social arrangements.

But their effectiveness derived principally from the deep-seated belief, widely held by each older generation and instilled in each younger generation, in the rightness, even the sacredness, of these relationships of commitment and these positions of moral authority, when properly defined and fairly exercised.

For much of human history, sadly, these positions of authority have been cruelly abused, and oppressive tyrannies have been justified in the name of custom and tradition. In such times there is a groaning and travail of the human spirit to be recognized for its inherent worth. The Old Testament prophets, as well as Christ himself, expressed the wrath of God against oppressive custom and rule-ridden religion. The liberation of the individual spirit is one of the central elements of Biblical wisdom. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” said Christ.

But then there are those other periods of history when anarchy is loosed upon the world. Lofty principles of human freedom and equal dignity are perverted by a licentious, permissive society, such as ours, to justify the abandonment of all notions of hierarchy, custom and ceremony. Every man does what is right in his own eyes

For some time now in our society we have been engaged in a program of gradually stripping ourselves of authoritative influences of every kind. Employees and students must often be deferred to in matters of business management and school administration.

The legitimacy of marriage and the family is seriously questioned, and their future is in doubt. The majority of our citizens conduct their lives with little or no dependence on the church, an institution which over the centuries has been relied upon (among its other functions) as a principal mechanism for restraining human wickedness and for inculcating respect for our other social arrangements.

In short, we have been removing our spiritual props, the social underpinnings of civilization, the barriers to unrestrained self-centeredness. We have become a people alienated from religion and communal custom. The gamble is that we can construct a new social order based almost entirely on the enlightened self-interest of good and rational men. This bet has been placed even in face of the montrosity of human evil dramatized in the global wars of this century.

2. Economic Man Run Amuck

The Old Testament prophets would focus our attention on a second major symptom which I can only describe as “economic man run amuck.” The industrial revolution has greatly improved the material well-being of the advanced societies of the world, and I do not mean to detract from the blessings of modern technology. But we have forgotten the economic wisdom of the Old Testament with its substantial limitations on man’s freedom to exploit the Earth’s human and non-human resources. The consequences have been serious.

One consequence has to do with urbanization and social decay. Over the ages up until the present century the vast majority of men and women dwelled in small, widely dispersed communities and rarely travelled to other places or communicated with other peoples. In our own country, as late as 1900, 60% of the people lived on farms or in villages. Today 70% of the American people live in metropolitan areas of 50,000 or more and occupy less than 3% of the land.

And in our communities, we experience a 20% turnover of residents each year. To varying degrees this same process is taking place around the world.

The industrialization of the economy has made our mobility and density of living possible but surely not necessary. Whatever the gains in efficiency of production and distribution of goods and services and in means of communication and social intercourse that have been afforded by urbanization, we have paid a fearful price in deteriorating housing in the central city, drug addiction, licentiousness and violence.

Let me mention a second consequence of our rejection of Biblical, economic wisdom. Over the last one hundred years, the advanced societies of the world have produced an economic engine of almost infinite productive powers. This economic engine has been made possible in large part by the unrestricted freedom of our industrial organizations to exploit the

Earth’s non-renewable resources, resources that took billions of years to create but that at our current rate of exploitation may take only another two generations to exhaust. And, of course, in our nation that comprises 6% of the world’s population but that consumes 35% of the world’s energy, we have produced forms of pollution that our environment cannot much longer absorb.

Hosea’s words to his generation are timely for our own: “Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air; and even the fishes of the sea are taken away.”

There is an interdependence between the moral order, including the morality of the economic order, and the well-being of all creation. The recent problems of environmental deterioration, inflation, recession, unemployment, foreign cartels and inadequate capital formation seem to defy the Keynesian tinkerings of our economists and to require a profound consideration of the ethical aspects of the economic order — the type of consideration that our specialists with their technical reason may well be incapable of undertaking.

3. The Menace of Totalitarianism

The third major symptom that would concern a prophet like Amos or Hosea has to do with the menace of totalitarianism. This century, with its global wars and political revolutions, has witnessed the emergence of three semi-continental superpowers: China, Russia and the United States. At least two, and perhaps all three, of these powers now have the military capability for destroying the world. While the United States, unlike China and Russia, has not discarded notions of civil liberty and private property, our government has in recent decades rapidly extended the scope of its political, economic and military power. With the deterioration of our other institutions and social arrangements, we have come to rely ever more on government for the ordering of all our affairs.

In recent years, we have witnessed the power and propensity of the executive branch of our government for snooping on and defaming its political enemies and manipulating public opinion.

These radical changes in both the scale and scope of political power have raised serious questions which haunt our age: ( I) Can the executive branch of government of the modern state be properly restricted in the use of its police power so that our civil liberties are maintained, and if so, will this branch at the same time have the necessary power to act quickly and decisively in its dealings with tyrannical world powers?

(2) Will life be worth living twenty years from now if almost every phase of human activity becomes subject to some degree of management and control on the part of massive, depersonalizing, government bureaucracies having no respect for the needs of the individual soul? (3) Finally, given the continuing refinement of nuclear weaponry and the dissemination of nuclear know-how, and given further the unchanging egoism and destructiveness of human nature, can we reasonably hope to avoid obliterative war?

2. THE UNDERLYING SICKNESS

So much for the serious symptoms of our present predicament. How would the Old Testament prophet! diagnose the underlying illness? How have we man aged to come so close to digging our own graves: What are the root causes of our predicament? Consider the tragedy. Beginning in the I7th and 18th centuries, some of the most gifted men in history brought about new possibilities for the good life for the masses of humanity through (a) the establishment of democratic governments in the West with effective guarantees of individual freedom from the tyranny of rulers. and (b) the discovery of scientific truths and the development of technology enabling men for the first time in history to maintain a high civilization without resort to human slavery and to subdue our ancient enemies of disease and malnutrition. But despite these new possibilities for humane living, we have proceeded over the last 60 or 70 years to lay waste our new powers and precious freedoms and devote ourselves, with our liberated technical reason, to getting and spending and warring.

This technical or manipulative reason is highly trained as to means but ignorant of ends. Modern man tries to avoid questions of ultimate human value and concern. We say to ourselves that we live in a pluralistic society; that fundamental questions must be asked, if at all, only in private, and that the only value on which we need agree, for all public purposes, is freedom itself. The truth is that freedom is only a negative value, and every society has its affirmative values and

24:17.7,1.7..W

theories, whether they be good or evil, whether they be stated or unstated, and whether they be coherent or shot through with self-contradiction.

Our secular society has attempted to operate on the basis of a facile theory of the self and a related theory of society. Both have been subversive of God’s high purposes for man and conducive to disaster.

The theory of the self holds that we only go this way once — that the meaning of life is to be found wholly within this present world. It then holds out happiness as the end of man, but happiness is no longer thought to involve the contemplation of God, or the pursuit of wisdom, or the strenuous exertion in fulfillment of one’s high calling, or the enjoyment of ideal forms of human community. Without God as the object of our longing, without any vision of spiritual or cultural excellence, happiness is euphemistically defined to mean the discovery and realization of our “authentic selves”.

This happiness through self-realization is to be achieved by shedding ourselves of our hangups: our illusory feelings of guilt instilled by a puritanical society. Once we are no longer uptight, we can then be honest with ourselves and others and develop warm, rewarding, unstructured personal relationships.

Stated bluntly, this theory of the self is, of course, nothing more than a subjective morality of desire: the hunger for an ever-increasing range of material things and sensual delights. The consequences of such a morality are internal chaos, hardness of heart, cynicism and despair. Accordingly, this theory of the self breaks down. Left without a spiritual center, the individual lacks the capacity for self-determination. He comes to embrace philosophies and religions of determinism and fatalism, wholly inconsistent with his high-sounding talk of self-realization. He looks to the stars and depends on the state. He doesn’t really want to be a responsible self.

The second theory, the theory of society, has been correlative to the theory of the self and has suffered a similar fate. Out of one side of modern man’s mouth. he says that society is nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. Individuals join together in sock cooperation not because they have shared ends, be because they can better obtain the economic mean for pursuing their private ends. Under this view the limited purpose of the law is to protect the individual’s person and property and enforce his contracts so that is free to carry out his private plans. Aside from the inherent inadequacy of this view, it has broken down with the breakdown of individual responsibility. In recent decades, secular man has said from the other side of his mouth that in the interests of our mutual security, we must centralize ever more power i government. New laws are enacted each year in the economic arena insuring the individual against the uncertainties of life and abridging his freedom of contract in order to protect him against his own frailty. Over the same period, most ironically, we have abolished the ancient legal prohibitions of pornography and deviant sexual behaviour and now confer nearly complete freedom of contract on frail man in the moral arena.

3. THE BIBLICAL VIEW

As against these fragmented, schizophrenic theories and assumptions of our modern world, as against our world of experts and specialists with their highly developed technical know-how, there stands the Biblical point of view. The Biblical view rejects the fragmentation and compartmentalization of truth and life. It calls for synthesis, asserting that all things hold together in Christ. It says that in the beginning was the Word; and that all things ever made, were made through Him. The Bible offers a view of the self and a view of society that hold together and do not break down as new facts come to light. It has stood the test of time.

There is another distinction. The Biblical view, unlike the theories of our secular world, does not start with the individual and society. It begins with the Author of the universe. Scripture affirms that God is good; that He cares for and sustains all of creation; and that He creates new possibilities and challenges for spiritual development in events of nature and history. While the Bible provides us with a firm foundation and a basic orientation, we nevertheless see through a glass darkly. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and our ways are not His ways. Thus the proper attitude of man before God and His creation is one of reverence and humility.

Its view of man and society is that we are the crown of creation, stamped with the image of God. It says that we share a common calling to become holy, loving, complementary members of a heavenly community.

Thus community is much more than an aggregation of individuals. Our moral development in this preparatory life can take place only in community, and God imposes His laws as the framework within which this development in community can flourish.

Among these laws are our obligations to future generations to care for the Earth, and our obligations within each generation to care for the least advantaged members of society.

Finally, the Bible asserts that all men disobey the heavenly call, forget God and His laws, and fall into the bondage of narrow self-interest. Attempting community, we resemble Schopenhauer’s porcupines, huddling together to keep warm, but wounding each other with our spines. In our sorry condition, God’s prophets issue their call for repentance and hold out the prospect of divine forgiveness and spiritual renewal.

Listen once again to the words of God through his prophet Hosea:

I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress they seek me, saying, “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up….

Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his going forth is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”

From Hosea 5-6

This is God’s gracious offer. But to an unscrupulous and defiant nation that rejects en masse this offer of reconciliation, God pronounces His awesome final judgment through His prophet Nahum: “Because you have made yourselves vile, I will dig your grave.”

I believe our nation is at this kind of crossroads with God and that time is running out: I am not so naive as to believe that the simple act of repentance and turning to God on the part even of millions of people and their leaders will of itself effect magic, instantaneous solutions to the complex problems of our age.

The solving of these problems will clearly require the best technical brainpower and the most profound political wisdom and statesmanship that our nation and our world can muster. But the mobilization of all this brainpower and wisdom will be pitifully ineffective without a contemporaneous spiritual awakening and moral renewal of major proportions.

God is calling us to turn from worldly cleverness and to lead lives of integrity and sincerity; to turn from a licentious society and to cultivate our marriages and families as the holy institutions they in fact are; to turn from petty ambition and self-seeking at our work and to become peacemakers with a capacity for listening love; to turn from the world’s frenetic, “work-hard, play-hard” philosophy of life and to lead lives of simplicity and quiet wisdom; to turn from worldly cynicism to a life of hope and serenity in which we look for the city whose builder and maker is God; and finally to turn from the hard-heartedness of the world and to lead lives of penitence and spiritual renewal through prayer and meditation on God’s Word.

Why is it that we see so few examples of this Christian life-style? Why is it that so few Christians evidence any improvement from year to year in the condition of their souls? And yet this transformation of character, this maturation into the full manhood of Christ, is the whole point of this life. Among the possible answers the following occure to me:

1. Most Christians do not appreciate the high stakes of their daily choices between good and evil. The divine scheme of compensation for good and evil is comprehensive and immutable. For every moral action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Every time I opt for evil the health of my soul declines, and others suffer.

2. Many Christians are pre occupied with self analysis in this age of psychoanalysis. They actually believe that their perpetual self-agonizing will spell change for the better, whereas the practice only heightens the self-centeredness from which they need divine deliverance. It is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but we should examine our lives in the light of God’s truths. The improvement of our souls usually comes unawares when our eyes are trained on God.

3. Many Christians operate out of fear of punishment and hope of reward. Such a legalistic religion may help to regulate conduct, but it does nothing to improve the soul. It only frustrates God’s purpose to remove self from the center of concern.

4. Most Christians do not have a vision: a vivid apprehension of God’s glory and his awesome put poses, as so dramatically evident for example, in certain of the Psalms or in Romans 8, I Corinthians 13 or Colossians 1. Character depends on strength of conviction. Strong convictions presuppose a vision

Having shared with you these noble thoughts about serenity and wisdom and the Christian vision, I realize that at the conclusion of this prayer breakfast, one my golf partners, whom I see in the audience, will confront me with the fact that he has often seen n after three successive blunders on the golf court, when I look neither very wise nor very serene. Just that game seems to have been designed for the mutual display of human frailty, so the gospel explodes human pretension and reminds us that without Christ.

We are nothing. Fortunately for you and me God knows our frailty and stands ready upon our sincere and humble application, to indwell us and change our lives. Then as we face the chilling issues of contemporary civilization, we can say with St. Paul that God has not given us a spirit of fear but rather a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind. This is our hope for a better world.